It’s reasonable to assume that healthcare providers would tend to eat healthily, but very often the exact opposite is true. They’re just as stressed as everybody else. They face intense pressures and time constraints. Nurses who work 12-hour shifts simply don’t have enough hours in the day to shop for, prepare and eat nutritious, home-cooked meals.
When the Secchia Institute for Culinary Education at Grand Rapids Community College (Michigan), where I am the program director, partnered with Corewell Health to create a 12-session cooking program for healthcare professionals working in the children’s intensive care unit, I knew it had to go beyond recipes. The goal was to create a professional learning experience that empowered these busy professionals to cook healthy and delicious food, despite the time constraints and stress of their work.
Making time to cook
As an educator, I have to meet people where they are. That meant including plenty of vegetarian and gluten-free recipes, but for the 115 nurses, pharmacists, physician assistants, doctors and administrators who took the cooking classes this past spring, the ingredient in shortest supply was time. To overcome this barrier to healthy cooking, the course taught them skills and offered them tools that made preparing meals at home less intimidating and time-consuming.
Every class taught strategies for streamlining meal prepping, and I used Share-a-Cart to generate grocery lists based on each recipe. By simply clicking on a QR code, students gained access to a digital shopping list that allowed them to place delivery orders with just a few clicks. The ingredients were listed in the same order they appeared in the recipe, and the shopping list included the cost of each ingredient so students would know in advance how much they were spending on a meal. While I did hear some students say, “Wow, that’s quite pricey,” more often I heard, “That’s not as much as I thought it would be.”
Healthy cooking made easy
While it was essential to make the recipes quick, we also wanted to make sure they tasted great and provided the nutrition to fuel healthcare providers through their long days (or nights) of work. For example, one of our recipes is for mac and cheese. Rather than using just macaroni and cheese, we added sweet potatoes to the sauce and added some hidden spinach. If we started with a meal that usually called for a minimal amount of vegetables but a lot of protein, we looked to flip the relationship to include more vegetables.
All of our pasta recipes include lentil pasta, which is gluten-free. This was another way that Share-A-Cart simplified cooking for our students. They didn’t need to run around looking for uncommon ingredients. They could see right away if they were in stock at the store they were ordering from.
Building community around food
While teaching healthy cooking was our goal, some of the most meaningful moments in the classes weren’t about the food at all — they were about nurses laughing, learning and reconnecting. During each session, we grouped students into stations, and they cooked together. People created some beautiful, professional-caliber buffets, and then they all sat down for half an hour or 40 minutes to share a group meal and some community time. There was no food waste because we invited everyone to bring in their to-go containers so they could take any leftover food home to share with their families.
The success of this program wasn’t just the meals we cooked. It had a lasting impact on participants’ habits, confidence and mindset. The moment health care providers do more of their own cooking at home, they’ll be healthier. According to a report from Nature Research Intelligence that reviewed more than 23.000 papers on cooking and well-being, food cooked at home, even though it may not be made with the greatest ingredients, is still healthier than most take-out food.
When healthcare providers get in the habit of cooking for themselves, it changes their conversations with patients. If a physician, physician assistant or nurse says, “Well, if I can cook like this, I think you can, too,” patients are more likely to give healthy cooking a try.
I got an email the other day from one of the students from the class, and she said that ever since March, she has been cooking at home using all the recipes she learned. That’s the real power of hands-on education: it equips people with tools they’ll actually use. For healthcare workers under constant pressure, that kind of practical, personal learning can be life-changing.
